Page 48 - swanns-way

guard my self-respect (which depended upon her keeping up
the fiction that she had asked me to let her know the result
of my search for something or other) made Françoise tell
me, in so many words ‘There is no answer’—words I have
so often, since then, heard the hall-porters in ‘mansions’
and the flunkeys in gambling-clubs and the like, repeat to
some poor girl, who replies in bewilderment: ‘What! he’s
said nothing? It’s not possible. You did give him my letter,
didn’t you? Very well, I shall wait a little longer.’ And just
as she invariably protests that she does not need the extra
gas which the porter offers to light for her, and sits on there,
hearing nothing further, except an occasional remark on
the weather which the porter exchanges with a messenger
whom he will send off suddenly, when he notices the time,
to put some customer’s wine on the ice; so, having declined
Françoise’s offer to make me some tea or to stay beside me,
I let her go off again to the servants’ hall, and lay down and
shut my eyes, and tried not to hear the voices of my family
who were drinking their coffee in the garden.
But after a few seconds I realised that, by writing that
line to Mamma, by approaching—at the risk of making her
angry—so near to her that I felt I could reach out and grasp
the moment in which I should see her again, I had cut my-
self off from the possibility of going to sleep until I actually
had seen her, and my heart began to beat more and more
painfully as I increased my agitation by ordering myself to
keep calm and to acquiesce in my ill-fortune. Then, sud-
denly, my anxiety subsided, a feeling of intense happiness
coursed through me, as when a strong medicine begins to

48 Swann’s Way